Conservatives deal with facts and reach conclusions; liberals have conclusions and sell them as facts.

Robert Avrech, who blogs at Seraphic Secret, read The Bookworm Returns : Life in Obama’s America, and then wrote the kind of review that every author dreams of getting. What makes it better than the mere words is the source. Robert is an Emmy Award winning screenwriter, which means that he really knows his writing. Add to that the fact that, as his blog routinely shows, he’s brilliant, erudite, compassionate, amusing, and just an all-around wonderful thinker . . . and, well, you understand how flattering it is to get a review like this:

A few days ago, a friend from shul told me that he feels like giving up.

“Reading your blog post about the countless gender choices on Facebook,” said my friend, “made me realize that my grandchildren won’t be shocked at this craziness. To them, it will be normal. And that is sick. It feels like the radical left have won the culture wars and now we’re just fighting over meaningless scraps.”

“We can’t just give up,” I said.

But his despair left a profound impression on me.

Is it true that the radical left have already won? Does the rise of a Marxist community agitator to POTUS mean the end of the American Republic?

Bookworm Room is a wife, a mother, a lawyer, and a blogger who is something of a hero to me. Whenever I need some common sense talk about difficult political or social issues, I make my way to Bookworm and see what she has to say.

Her opening essay on guns, written as a letter to a teacher (but wisely never sent) is a classic discourse on the Second Amendment, and how best to protect our children.

Because Bookworm is a brainy lawyer who has not sacrificed her common sense, she writes astonishingly clear sentences that manage to cut to the heart of, well, everything.

Her chapters on what the Democrats have done to our health care system is, quite simply, revelatory.

Read the rest here. Even if you don’t want to read the rest of the review, you might want to check it out because Robert’s pretty sure he’s found a picture of me.

Some lessons seem almost impossible to learn in the abstract. Even if we know the hard truth, until it has an impact upon our own lives, we go merrily along, assuming that the worst will never happen and that, if it does, we’ll muddle through somehow.

I’ve known a couple of people who awoke to find their homes on fire. Both had exactly the same response: “This can’t be happening to me.” They were wrong. It was happening to them and both ended up losing everything to the fire. The fire also exerted profound behavioral control over them. Neither would ever again sleep in the buff. Both had fire extinguishers in every room. And both vowed never again to get too attached to possessions, since they were, ultimately, so ephemeral.

Experience is a good teacher.

Jews, collectively, have experienced thousands of years of persecution, culminating in the Holocaust. Israel, collectively, learned from the Holocaust that Jews must always be capable of self-defense.

Sadly, though, Jews as individuals, rather than as a collective, especially American Jews, have learned few lessons from the past. Like the German Jews before them, they think “It can’t happen here.” And like the true Leftists they are, they think the only safe repository for weapons is the state — forgetting entirely that it was the German state that used those same weapons for genocide on a hitherto unknown scale.

All of which leads me to Robert Avrech’s autobiographical essay about life in Los Angeles during the 1992 riots. As Robert mentions in his essay, he had been in Israel during the Yom Kippur War, so he knew that it could happen (including know that children are always a terrorist’s first soft target). But until the 1992 riots, he had never fully appreciated that it could happen here.

Moreover, when it happened, it didn’t just have to be them against the Jews, which seems to be the only historic lesson Jews will ever contemplate. It could be them against whoever and whatever you are. In 1992, it was them against whites and Koreans and, as is always the case when riots take hold, the rioters also manage to destroy the weakest and most vulnerable in their own communities.

The riots also brought another lesson home to Robert: when all Hell breaks loose, the statistical likelihood is that the police will not be there to protect you. What few people remember until it’s too late is that the police are a peace-time entity. They are not equipped to deal with vast uprisings. That’s an army’s responsibility. But in America, the military isn’t going to be there instantly either. It takes time for the President to mobilize the National Guard, assuming he even decides that a particular riot merits that response. So, with police disabled and the military absent, you are on your own.

I figured this one out, not after the L.A. riots, but after Hurricane Katrina. Despite the savagery of the media’s knee-jerk attack against George Bush, the fact is that it was completely obvious from Day 1 that no government entity could aid all people at all the times. The only ones who were assured of a modicum of safety against looters were those sitting on their porches with a rifle or semi-automatic in their lap.

Robert’s essay is delightful (he’s a professional screenwriter, so he really knows how to tell a tale), but it’s also a reminder: It can happen here, whatever it happens to be. It could be a pogrom, a Holocaust, a race riot, Zombies, etc. You could be under attack because you’re white, black, Jewish, Asian, Hispanic, short, tall, rich, or poor. It could happen spontaneously or because of a natural disaster. The one thing we know with absolutely certainty is that, if it does happen, if you’re unarmed, you’re helpless. Dumb luck might see you out of the line of fire or within the ambit of police protection but, without that luck . . . .

Robert Avrech, who blogs at Seraphic Secret, flattered me tremendously when he asked me to read his e-book How I Married Karen and, if I felt so inclined to write a pre-publication blurb. As it turned out, I felt very inclined, because the book was a pleasure from beginning to end. Or as I wrote:

I’m a little at a loss as to how to review “How I Married Karen,” because I’m afraid that giving it the extremely high praise it deserves will sound fatuous. Surely a book can’t be this good? Well, yes it can. Within 164 light, bubbly, moving, funny pages, Robert J. Avrech packs in so much: the abiding wonder of finding one’s true love; the academic woes of a square peg in school’s relentlessly round holes; life as an Orthodox Jew in New York in the 1960s and 1970s; the way in which movies provide so much of a backdrop to and reference point for our lives; adolescent angst; morality; and patriotism. That Mr. Avrech manages so gracefully to crowd so many ideas into one small book is a testament to both his skill as a writer and to his transcendent love for his wife, Karen Avrech. After I gobbled up the book, I felt lighter and happier for the rest of the day.

If you are interested in brightening your holiday by learning where to buy How I Married Karen, or if you’d just like to read all the other rave reviews Robert’s e-book garnered, go here. The book isn’t yet available on Amazon, but I’ll let you know when it is.